Tobacco 's Burden Of Disease Essay

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1. Tobacco’s “burden of disease”
Tobacco use is widespread and has a heavy “burden of disease”. According to the U.S. department of Health and Human Services [HHS], tobacco use is related to over 443,000 Americans death each year and has caused approximately 8,860,000 related illnesses (2016). Thus causing it to have a higher mortality rate than “HIV, illegal drug use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined. Tobacco use is thus one of the Nation’s deadliest and most costly public health challenges” (HHS, 2016). Tobacco can cause the onset of multiple diseases, for example, cancer, cardiovascular disease, asthma, COPD, pregnancy complications, SIDS, and oral diseases (HHS, 2016). The prevalence of tobacco use has been gradually decreasing since the nineteen sixty’s, but even today tobacco use is quite common.
2. The course of the disease: the concepts of incidence, prevalence, and case-fatality.
The concepts of the course of disease are not fully relevant to the subject of tobacco, but can be examined and applied in part. The concept of incidence is the rate of chance that a disease occurs over a period time (Riegelman & Kirkwood, 2015, p. 298). In other words, it is the rate of new cases of a disease. For tobacco use, over two thousand teens and young adults become daily smokers each day in the United States (CDC, 2015). The concept of prevalence in public health is the proportion of those within a population at a set period of time that are afflicted
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